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Saturday, 10 August 2013

Many
years ago, one of my children decided that one good way of putting
his newfound walking ability to use was to bolt around the house
targeting furniture and people, and asking about the names of
whatever he bumped into. One day, he crash-landed on the arm of an
armchair. Having asked what that was, and having received the answer
um braço
(‘an arm’), he forgot to race to his next victim. He was
dumbfounded: an arm??
He already knew the word for ‘human upper limb’, so he
endlessly repeated his question, first slapping the arms of the
armchair, then slapping his own arms, and then alternately slapping
each of the two ‘arm’-thingies, until he satisfied himself that
those completely different objects indeed went by the same name.

He
had no idea, of course, that we adults decided that one good way of
putting our vocabularies to use was to extend the meaning(s) of
words, for example by means of metaphor. Metaphors use comparisons
without using the word like:
the arms of an armchair aren’t like
arms, they are
arms, and we call them so by name. My boy’s bafflement got me
baffled, too, about two things. First, why do we say that adults use
metaphor and children use overextension (or overgeneralisation)? When
big ones call a part of a table leg,
and when little ones call any cutlery spoon,
we’re all doing the same thing: giving the same name to whatever
strikes us as similar. You can read introductory accounts of
metaphorical and overextension processes in Chapters 9 and 12 of my
book The Language of Language, respectively, and a full
account of this armchair episode in Chapter 8 of another book of
mine, Three is a Crowd?.

The
second thing that got me wondering was what exactly is it that
prompts our perception of “similarity” – whether we’re
intending to compare things metaphorically or not. Do we say that an
armchair has arms because armchairs look like sitting human beings
relaxing their arms on their sides, because their lateral appendages
feel like arms when we sit, or because we rest our arms on them? That
is, what does the “arm” in armchair
mean? And, for those languages which have equivalent concepts
designating armchairs,
does the arm bit mean the same? Not to speak of the chair bit, of
course. That is, how are metaphorical meanings got at, in different
languages? For a thorough discussion of metaphor generation and usage in
English, try Andrew Goatly’s book The Language of Metaphors.

Words
and word-based constructions, however, are just one fraction of the
linguistic devices that we can use metaphorically. Our languages come
complete with gestures, including vocal gestures,
through which we can create meanings. Prosodic metaphors are the
reason why the “same” word can be used – and interpreted – as
a term of endearment or of abuse, as I noted in a previous post.
It all depends how you say it: our uses of words create their
meanings. Do we use rising (as opposed to falling) tones of voice,
say, because rises vs. falls carry distinct meanings in our
language(s), because we want to show politeness or encouragement, or
because rises but not falls happen to be characteristic of our
language(s)? And what do these vocal gestures mean to other people,
when we use them, unwittingly, in a different language
from the one(s) in which they’re meaningful to us?

Metaphors build on constructed
associations of meanings, in arbitrary,
culture-bound ways. The same is true of other forms of
comparison which permeate our everyday uses of language, including
analogy. In a review of Cameron
Shelley’s book Multiple Analogies in Science and Philosophy, I argue that
analogy is “central to everyday reasoning about everyday
happenings”, so much so that “we hardly
realise the extent to which it shapes our thought.”

Predictably, metaphors
and analogies abound in scientific
thought, too. Their use
“overextends” our thinking from what is familiar to us to what we
know (nearly) nothing about, and then, once accepted as legitimate
ways of expressing our observations, they constrain further thought,
for better or for worse. If we call an X
a big bang,
say, we want to associate X
to whatever we already know of bigness and of bangness. Which, of
course, may not match what someone else understands by these words,
even if we’re all using them in the same language.

And
what to say of the metaphors that riddle discussions about
multilingualism? What, exactly, do we mean by labels
such as balanced,
half-/semi-,
dominant,
first,
mother,
standard,
which have become “standard” in shaping our thought about
language? Why, exactly, do we go on using such terminology?
Have a look in my book
Multilinguals are...?,
for more about this.

My next post keeps to the topic of
things we like to interpret metaphorically.

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About Me

I’m a freelance
linguist with a keen interest in multilingualism. I was born in
Portugal, acquired French in Africa at age 3, married a Swede a
little later, raised three trilingual children (mostly) in Singapore,
and I work (mostly) in English. Homepage: Being Multilingual

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